


a static-inbetween

by cicadas



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Study, Dissociation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Instability, Non-Linear Narrative, Steve Harrington-centric, Unreliable Narrator, except its definitely a self insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-20 12:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20675573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicadas/pseuds/cicadas
Summary: At age four, Steve once tried to take a pen to his wrist because he thought that’s where ink came from. His mother told the story as a comedy when they had guests over. Steve still has the scar.-Barb is missing, but Steve can't remember why.





	a static-inbetween

**Author's Note:**

> I had cut this down immensely, but the original storyline was dearer to me despite its convolutions.  
Set in season one. Other details are up to interpretation.

-

The feeling doesn’t come all at once.

Steve stares down the barrel of a gun, but it isn’t a gun. He’s swaying a little too much. The lights around him are reflections of the whites of his eyes. The kettle is still on the floor from where he dropped it. Missed his toes by a little. He isn’t wearing socks.

He's heard it described as a rush, but it's not. It’s not a wave; it’s a lake. There's no noise and no crash and no foam stretching over crushed seashells. He's never seen the beach. Maybe that's why he's different. Why when he steps, it's into stagnant water. When it rains, the water rises, and the banks get mushy where the ground was cracked before. He wades into it willingly sometimes.

Steve picks the kettle up but doesn’t feel the heat of the metal on his fingers. It’s like an afterthought. He lets go once it’s back on the stove, burner still set to high, and he sticks his hand in the sink where the pads of his fingers are too warm. The cool metal isn’t soothing, but the action does something to keep him in place.

He's wading out further when the phone rings. His socks aren’t wet because he isn’t wearing them. Steve is staring down the barrel of a gun, but it’s just his reflection in the bottom of the sink.

_-_

Growing up, Steve spent the majority of his after-school time in front of the TV with a Lean Cuisine and a lukewarm Diet Coke from the box beside the fridge (his mother bought them when he asked, but he was never allowed to keep them in the fridge). He didn’t have any extra-curricular activities until he started high school, and his dad signed him up for swimming, track and basketball to work off what the Lean Cuisines put on. To give him a sense of pride in his body, and a sense of responsibility in a team environment. People are going to rely on him, and he has to _perform_.

_Basketball is a team sport. Two teams of five players each try to score by shooting a ball through a hoop—_

_If the offensive team puts the ball into play behind the mid-court line, it has ten seconds to get the ball over the mid-court line._

He watched _Reading Rainbow_, and _Mr. Rogers_, who taught him many a thing about how the world really works (if you are in trouble you can ask for help), as he munched away on low calorie carbonara with less than 10g of fat. He moved onto _Cheers_ and Pall Mall’s in a pack of 20s when he got past the lock on the glass sliding door, and he stared at the blue lights at the bottom of the pool until he fell asleep. Summer would change to winter overnight, and the chill would pinch his skin until he woke up enough to drag himself to bed. Sometimes he’d decide on tomorrow night’s Lean Cuisine on the walk upstairs to his bedroom.

-

Steve picked up a baseball bat that wasn’t really a baseball bat on his seventeenth birthday.

Nancy had forgotten, but it was alright—He wasn’t going over there to remind her, or make her feel sorry, he just wanted to apologise. He knew Nancy would be at the Byers’. With Jonathan. That was fine. He’d do a quick one-two, talk it out, get himself straight and drive home. Maybe catch the tail end of _Knight Rider _before he crashed on the couch. His parents wouldn’t be home until Tuesday, and he’d clean up the mess and thank them for the gift they left on the island by Monday night.

He had a plan. Then he had a gun shoved in his face, and his stomach dropped down to his feet.

He thinks of that moment and sees the lights blur when someone chews too loudly next to him in the cafeteria. His hands are too dry around the wood, but it isn’t wood.

(He didn’t realise the thump of nails sticking into skin would sound so _wet.)_

He has a gun pointed in his face, but he doesn’t, because he isn’t really there. The noises and colors around him are as flat and far-away as they are on the living room TV. He’s never been afraid of what he’s seen on TV before.

He passes Nancy in the hallway, and thinks he catches his own reflection in the crowd in front of him.

His palms sweat on the plastic cutlery.

-

The kettle is still on the floor and the stove is licking flames up the side of it.

Steve is at the bottom of the pool, staring down the blue LED’s that burn color onto the backs of his eyes. If he stares long enough, shapes start to form. Strain, refraction, phosphenes. Rods and cones and a lesson he didn't pay attention to. (They twisted into teeth, once, coming at him and sinking into the meaty flesh of his upper arm. The sensation was like biting through cold lard. He felt the teeth go through his skin and was the one who bit. He was the teeth.  He wonders how he could be the monster and the victim at the same time.)

_We just need to ask you a few questions and we’ll let you get back to practise, alright Stephen? We just need to—_

_Your house was the last place she was seen, and as your parents were out of town we can’t ask them to confirm any details. Now, you can request to have them present if you wish so we can continue, but we really just—_

He can breathe down here. He is in bed, flying around the ceiling. The air is so much clearer. Mr. Rogers says it’s okay to ask for help, it’s okay to cry, and that Lean Cuisines are okay to eat for every meal if you aren’t old enough to grocery shop.

There is no milk in the fridge but there’s Diet Coke, his lungs are burning, and the lake is swallowing him up still.

The higher he flies, the further he sinks. Steve puts his track pants in the washing machine with one spoon of detergent and doesn’t wash his hair for another day.

-

He gets prescribed diazepam for the shakes and the spacing out when he visits his mother’s favourite doctor. Puts his bottle of pills beside hers in the empty Wheaties box. This one has another Steve on it, except he’s a cycler. His dad had pointed at it, tapping the man’s cardboard face hard enough to rattle the cereal inside, telling him, ‘You see, you see what happens when you persevere, Stephen? When you don’t _quit_. When you don’t just give up and let your _team down-’_

Young Steve didn’t tell his dad swimming doesn’t really work in teams unless he joined the old ladies water aerobics - that he swam mostly backstroke and freestyle and his shoulders just don’t show it but he _really tried_ to qualify for State Championships.

Older Steve takes two blue pills and tries to eat cereal from the same Wheaties box an hour later.

-

In autumn of 1980, a specific Wednesday made two weeks since his parents had been out of town and hadn’t called. They usually phoned, extended their stay, said I love you and ‘we’ll wire you some money for lunch’. (They sent enough to cover _a_ lunch, not lunch for the next four days they’ll still be absent) and hung up leaving him feeling empty but informed. On this specific Wednesday, Steve decided nobody at school was allowed to call him Stephen anymore, and his girlfriend Janie was not allowed to call him Stevie anymore, and that it didn’t matter whether she was free on Saturday anyway because he just didn’t feel the same as he did when they started dating in May, so she needn’t come aroundanymore.

She cried, and he patted her shoulder with hands that felt too-large and meaty for his stranger’s body. She hugged him, then she shoved him, and Steve looked down at his feet and noticed his socks were mismatched.

-

(One minute. Breathe in again, regroup. Aluminium can be crushed and recycled. Aerosols can explode if the can is pierced. Speak into the lower end of the phone where the cord connects.)

“Hello?”

_Do you know where you are, Stephen?_

_Hospital._

“Steve! I’ve been calling non-stop for minutes - are you OK?”

_You have a friend waiting outside. She can come in and see you after we make sure you’re OK._

_OK._

“Nancy?”

_For verification, can you tell us your full name and birthdate, please?_

_Stephen John Harrington. November twelfth, nineteen-sixty-six._

“Yeah, it’s me. It’s Nancy. You were going to come around for dinner but you never showed. My mom made meatloaf.”

_Do you remember how you got here, Stephen?_

_No._

“Nancy.”

_Do you know why you’re here at all?_

_No._

“Steve, I’m here. What’s going on? You sound…You sound off. Are you sure you’re OK?”

_We’re going to need to call your parents. Do you know where they’re staying, currently?_

“No.”

(Three minutes have passed. Breathe in again, regroup. His details have not changed. Feet planted on the linoleum. Brown. Toenails too long. Nancy is coming. She always knows what to do. Tells him he should know better.)

-

There’s colour and light in the wake of something so heavy, so heavy on his chest, and Steve coughs up wet breaths into scratchy cotton.

The blue light is gone, replaced by dark green and white and it is far too fuzzy. He needs to check if his socks are wet. Can’t feel them on his feet. Is the flame still reaching too far up the side of the teapot? He needs to turn it down.

Steve doesn’t remember ever liking tea. His mother makes it sometimes, when she’s home, and gives him half a sugar when she knows his father isn’t looking. They share a smile when he isn’t looking, too, and it’s some kind of cheeky, knowing, shared thing he holds very precious inside where other people can’t reach.

He’s seen a therapist - one he knew doesn’t know his family - who told him this behaviour is normal but that it doesn’t make it any easier. That feeling absent from your body is common. But she had a haircut and blue eyes and hearing her words made Steve want to die, so he payed in cash and drove the half hour back to Hawkins with his mind tuned to a loud and grey and all-consuming static.

The space around him feels like static now.

“What were you doing in the- in the _pool_—Steve, you know what happened—you should—”

Steve’s lungs hurt a bit. His lungs. His own lungs. Inside his body, moving, organs. His.

“You should be more careful than this, God, Steve, if you need help just _call_—”

The voice speaking doesn’t belong, so he doesn’t listen. He hasn’t really listened since the voice told him to Get. Out. with a silver six-shooter pointed at the space between his eyes.

Steve rolls over on his side, pinning his arm between it and something cold and smooth, and vomits chlorine water and Valium until it dribbles down his neck.

-

“You should tell us what happened, Steve.”

The officer’s name is Crawley, and she’s nice, but Steve hadn’t met her before. He was nervous on the phone, nervous on the drive over, nervous about whether he should button up his shirt all the way to the collar to look presentable or whether that would look like he was trying to impress them or trick them or—

“Any further information you can give would help us out greatly, buddy,” Her partner said, and Steve couldn’t see his name tag, but he didn’t know this guy either.

Not that knowing that any of it would’ve helped. But he knew everybody in this town. Thought he knew everything about everyone and who they were dating and who would sell him cigarettes without ID and who the loner students where and _where they would go if they chose to skip school for three days—_

“No, Tom, he can tell us. You can tell us, right Steve?” She found his gaze, and she held it. “What happened that night?”

He didn’t know Barbara Holland as well as he thought he would’ve, dating Nancy. Than he should’ve. He’d been told about her band practice and library sessions with Nance because she couldn’t come over on Fridays and he knew she permed her hair because someone saw her at the salon once and made fun of her for lying about it even though it was so stupid. All the little tugs at her too-tight blouses and knocks of her too-many books when she walked by him and Tommy H. were so stupid. It wasn’t him that pinched, but he laughed, and it wasn’t him that gave her the knife but he told her to pierce the can and drink, and it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.

“It wasn’t me.”

The officers had looked at each other, but Steve was focused on the space between their heads, where he could see the frosted glass of the door.

“Steve—”

He could walk right through it, step through easy as smoke, and nobody would ask him about her ever again. He could step a little further, out of the hot, unventilated office and into something cool. A lake. The nice lake at the bottom of the quarry, even though it’s murky and jagged at the bottom, not nice at all.

“It wasn’t me.”

He could float over the edge and dip his toes down into it. Vacation there like his parents do in Florida.

“Steve, what wasn’t you? What happened to Barbara?”

It wasn’t.

-

“Steve! Just tell me what happened! You’re my friend, and I’m sorry that things got messed up between us, but you can’t just shut me out! The cops are saying—”

She wants him to cave. She’s yelling like he’ll cave, but he won’t. He knows the cops—that any of them—haven’t said shit because they don’t give out information like that, especially not to teenage girls in their Senior year named Nancy Wheeler. She probably knows he knows that, which is why she’s going for the emotional approach.

Steve stands still and watches her talk, hears her words, and feels nothing.

“You promised me that when we started dating we would tell each other everything. You promised.” Nancy says, and Steve finds his autopilot mouth opening.

“I promised.” He says.

It’s true. A neutral statement. Neither an admission or an acknowledgement - just an echo.

Nancy’s eyes widen, her face colors, and she reaches out to grab at the lapel of Steve’s grey jacket. Too warm for anything thicker. Not as nice as something his dad would like him to be seen outside in. He wears Suits. He does Business. His son is in Sports.

“Steve—” His focus is brought back, to Nancy, with her hand bumping his chest when she pulls back and forth on his jacket. “You_ promised.”_

He thinks maybe she’s crying, but he isn’t sure. He can't remember what he’s meant to do if someone cries.

Janie hugged him and left and he had his hand on her shoulder but this isn’t the same thing, and he can’t remember when that was. Nancy, not Janie. They both aren’t dating Steve anymore, and he is Steve. Everything seems so simple and yet Nancy is still crying.

“I promised.” He (Steve) repeats, because it’s all he can say at the minute. The thoughts in his head are words, but the words in his mouth are different and they just won’t connect.

When he saw that therapist, she told him to take his time, to come back to himself slowly, safely. _‘It is important you feel comfortable within your body. That it is a place you will want your consciousness to stay.’_

When she spoke, he heard her words blend with his father telling him they _aren’t buying any more Wheaties until he loses what he gained_, and that _if he wants to work for him in the future he has to look sharp in a suit, because if he doesn’t look like he belongs then he doesn’t belong._

“Doesn’t belong.”

The face in front of his looks familiar, and her teeth and jaw are pointed when they jut out toward him. “What doesn’t belong?”

It’s asked like a question, but it’s angry. The words are angry. She knows how to connect her thoughts and her words. Maybe she can teach him how.

(He feels like he’s five, learning to speak, when his 18th birthday has just gone and the day just reminded him of bats not meant for baseball and fire and lights and black blood oozing into Mrs. Byers’ carpet, smoking, curling up into his nose and settling down in his lungs to burn there, too.)

“I turned eighteen yesterday.” He says.

It’s relevant. He’s connecting.

Nancy’s jaw clicks shut. He wonders if her teeth ever cut her lip if she does that too quickly.

“Well happy birthday, Steve.”

Nancy leaves her words with him when she leaves, walking in the direction of some place Steve _should know_ but he can’t _think._

He needs a Valium. He needs a calm safe space and a smile from his mother and a chicken and broccoli Lean Cuisine because it’s the only type she ordered for delivery. He will leave the empty cartons in the trash and the trash in the bag for when they get back so his dad will see he’s been eating right. So his mom will see he’s been eating at all.

Steve looks up, and remembers he was meant to talk with Nancy, but he can’t remember what about.

-

They tell him, later, that it wasn’t enough.

They tell him when he’s sitting in the ER with vomit still clinging to his neck like it wants to choke him. It couldn’t kill him on the inside so it’s trying the outside, too.

Nancy is there, and it’s not a gun she’s pressing to his head. It’s a towel. Smelling of chlorine and spit and black, black blood…

-

He spends some time in hospital. A day, maximum. They wanted to move him to psych, and he considered trying to make himself cry to make his pleading more intentional. It didn’t work. They called his dad. He was picked up and carried to the backseat like a child, and for the first time he really did feel like one.

His mother takes his diazepam out of the Wheaties box, and Steve watches her walk past the trash can he thinks she’ll throw them in to place the bottle right in his hand, clasping his fingers over the hard plastic. She pats his cheek and tells him she needs a glass of wine. 

She’s had a long day.

-

_ “It’s not enough, is it?” _

Barb takes the Ziploc from his hand. Hers are small and pudgy. His are wide when he splays his fingers. Wide but not rough. He plays basketball, doesn’t chop wood. He’s an asshole but he’s still nice enough to help someone out. Especially if it means they’ll leave his house when they weren’t exactly invited in the first place.

She’s being a downer, and he has every right to feign a bit of sympathy if it’ll get her to leave. He tells it to himself because nobody else does.

“Sh-” Pause, regroup. “Sure, it’s fine. Barbara, it’s a good amount. You wanna go, you can go. I’m not gonna tell.”

“But is it enough, Steve?”

She presses, like it’s important. Steve’s drunk, but even so he can tell when someone’s being pushy. When they want something.

“It’s enough.” He tells her. Lies easier than he does when he tells Nancy he got good grades on that test she helped him, or when his dad found out he had the spare key to the liquor cabinet. He loves his parents. Loves his friends. Loves his team. Loves this town.

“Just head off. If she asks, I’ll say you’ve gone home. I’ll be with Nancy, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

He pats her on the shoulder like he did Janie. He pulls a long sip of beer with the other hand. Vows he’ll call her mom tomorrow. Or get Nancy to call her mom tomorrow. Follow up with the hospital. Stop in and see the Chief. The guy is an asshole but he has his moments of softness. Steps down to eye level and really looks. He’s done it to Steve once, the only time he’s ever come ‘round the house. He wonders who would’ve called that in: _‘Noise complaint, possible domestic dispute…some kid standing outside the neighbor’s window in boxer briefs not answering to his name’_

It’s a joke. Steve’s better than that. He's not a kid, he’s not drunk, he’s not gone. He’s not.

He closes his stranger’s hand around Barb’s warm one as far as it can stretch over the flimsy plastic and tells her the path leading to the quarry is past the pool fence, walk slightly to the left, then keep going till the trees thin out.

She’ll pass out and wake up in the morning embarrassed, and she won't come around here anymore.

Barb lets him hold her hand a minute longer than Steve wants to, so he’s the one to move first.

She’s probably nervous. He would be. But he isn’t the one who wants to OD on his mother’s Valium by a shitty lake that used to be a shale mine. He isn’t even sure she’s fully serious. So he lets go, and swings his arm down as his other comes up to press metal to his mouth once more.

He pulls away with an ‘aah’, relishes in the fizz at the back of his throat, stifles a burp. That’s a Tommy thing, and he isn’t a Tommy (yet).

Barb looks like an owl with those eyes and those glasses, squinting her eyes just a little. She’s got a friendly face, but her shirts have ruffles and buttons shaped like flowers, and she wipes mint gum over the mouthpiece of her tuba before she plays, and she hates Steve’s friends and the entirety of the basketball team. She might be nice, if she wasn’t so weird.

Steve thinks some part of him knows her favourite color, but he can’t remember right now. He just knows this is taking a while, and they’re tucked over all private by the other end of the pool, and he hopes Nancy doesn’t get the wrong impression, if she can even see them at all.

He knows that Barb would’ve told Nancy if there was _actually_ something wrong, and Nancy would’ve told him, so she’s probably not serious. Not that he gave her enough if she was. Because he didn’t. He wouldn’t do something so selfish.

Barb tucks a not-real-curl behind her ear.

“Thanks, Steve.” She says.

“I won’t tell anyone.”

-

It’s a lack of sensation in his skin. An absence of being. Floating and sinking. Being rooted in place, stuck to the floor by soles of his feet, while he drifts up and clouds around the light fixtures on the ceiling, looking for a crack in the window to slip out of and dissipate into the air.

He leaves himself behind, and is the one left behind all at once.

The Steve stuck to the couch who is staring at a screen gone static still feels like it wasn’t his fault. That she probably might’ve been tricking him. Testing him. That he’s been this way forever. That someone should’ve been watching out for _him._

The Steve stuck on the couch has no say in allowing these thoughts to become words. There’s nobody there to ask him a question. Nobody to reply to, no autopilot answer to give. Banging on the glass sliding door, trying to get in.

He doesn’t know why Barb came to him. Why she came with Nancy to the house when it was meant to be just them. It was a parent-free house he invited his girlfriend to, did she think that meant they were going to hang out? She wears glasses. She hates the basketball team. She hates Steve. Why tell _him_ something so important?

(The floating gets a bit heavier, and it’s colder in the water. His toes are freezing. He isn’t wearing socks.)

How is a seventeen year old meant to know what is important and what isn’t? They don’t teach you in school. There’s a sex-ed class with condoms and bananas but nothing about how to determine whether a chubby girl in band is testing you when she tells you she needs drugs and she _‘knows you have it’._

No, he doesn’t know anything. He’s not even here. He has a gun pointed to his head and it might be real this time.

-

“I can’t believe you.”

Someone says words in a voice he recognises, but Officer Crawley shushes it out of the room. Closes a door that sounds heavy. A lock that latches. Her face is blank and eyes still dark, dark brown when he looks at them. Steve knows her. He’s seen her.

“Do you know where you are, Stephen?”

Nobody calls him Stephen.

Officer Crawley frowns, and it makes Steve frown in response. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He knows where he is. He knows her face.

“Nobody calls who Stephen?”

“Nobody calls me Stephen.” He repeats, because he can’t be sure he spoke before.

Officer Crawley nods. Steve mimics the movement without thinking. The word ‘child’ comes into his head again, but this connection doesn’t make it to his mouth. Crawley presses two fingers into the side of her radio, brings it to her lips, calls in a doctor Steve hasn’t heard of and doesn’t care about.

They can’t do anything. They can’t make him come back. They can’t make Barb come back.

“Barb’s dead.”

He says, because it’s true. No matter how many shocked looks he gets for saying it, it’s true. It’s one of the only truths he’s spoken since he told her the shortcut to the quarry through the woods at the back of his house. Everything since then has been words spurned from tongue and teeth and muscle. Not him. Not his brain.

“Yes, Barb’s dead. She died.” Crawley confirms, slowly.

Steve nods. “Thank you.”

Crawley picks up her radio and repeats, “Again, I’m gonna need a doc in here, I’m losing the kid again. Someone hep me out here.”

“Any further information you can give would help us out greatly, buddy,” Steve murmurs to himself. Then his eyes prick, and he hunches forward into a sob, one arm stopped halfway - his wrist is pressed against a kind of bar and he doesn’t know why, but he’s crying, and it feels so good that it makes him cry harder.

He’s in a bed in a hospital just outside Hawkins, and it’s been a year and three months since Barb died.

She didn’t take the pills he gave her.

She was seeing the school counsellor each Thursday, but hadn’t told her mom or Nancy, and none of the band geeks were that close to her to know. She sometimes took more Advil than necessary when she had a headache but she wasn’t irresponsible. She was just lonely.

She followed Nancy around everywhere but she was lonely, and when he sees a psych they tell him they see a lot of lonely teens take this route and it’s so very devastating.

Devastating, yes. But Steve can’t focus on that right now.

Because the Ziploc was intact, beside a few loose sheets of shale at a corner where the rock dips down, a rock face turning from steep to a straight drop.

-

At age four, Steve once tried to take a pen to his wrist because he thought that’s where ink came from. His mother told the story as a comedy when they had guests over. Steve still has the scar.

-

He's got his fingers pressed to the sink. He knows this. Not warm, not cold. The water is rising up his ankles, soothing him, lighter than any body of water he's ever been in. He takes another step.

He’s wading out further when the phone rings. It brings him back. Three breaths in. Creates his calm, safe space. His body is a place he feels comfortable in, and he would like to return now.

The phone stops ringing. Rings again.

This time, Steve shakes his fingers, feels them burning, and uses them to wrap around the beige receiver on the wall and bring it to his ear.

-

At the bottom of the pool, the silicone between the tiles has started to turn green. Mrs. Harrington chose alabaster because white didn’t match the lovely walls inside and blue was tacky. She said yes to the LED’s when the gardener suggested it would give a lovely glow when lit up at night.

_The pool and surrounding area will have that clean, streamlined Loch Nora look of white, marble and wood while also giving off a new, futuristic edge with the addition of the blue—_

They had a ‘pool guy’ for several months after it was first finished, and the ladies from Bridge and Poker and the usual crowd milling around inside the hairdressing salon would come over to drink white wine in their heels and gossip until it turned bitter and mean. His mother would tip her stiletto into a piece of news and dig until she pierced way past the surface. She knew everyone in this town, didn’t they know, she’d find out eventually, better to just let her know now. A lot of things were price discounted, stories invented, false scripts looked over. The head pharmacist was named Dane and would come over for a roast dinner ordered from a very well established catering company every third month. That was when her medication was reviewed with the psychiatrist. Dane knew her better than the doctors, and he’d be able to fix her up with any loose ends they left her with. She’d tell this as a comedy at the table, too. Though there was only Steve and his father around to hear it.

He can hear his heartbeat very clearly underwater. Grows louder with each second. Like it’s his internal self, banging on his skin with thick, gooey punches, trying to make as loud a sound as possible. Steve knows what skin looks like when it’s turned inside out. It’s wet.

He’s seen it on himself, on other people. He’s seen things on the outside that are meant to stay in. Steve opens his mouth to breathe and swallows instead. His body reflexing, reacting. Heart thudding in his chest, warning him no.

He thinks maybe he should swim up, but it’s heavy down here. Lukewarm like a bath he’s been left in before. Not comfortable, but familiar. Steve takes a drink from the thickest atmosphere he’s ever been in and reaches his hands up to the sky.

Whatever he swallowed before this moment churns, his skin burns, and he feels the bathwater slip from his fingers as he’s pulled up. Up. Up. Body like the lightest thing, becoming heavier the further he’s taken. He thinks, vaguely, that he isn’t pleased. He hasn’t been down long enough to hit the lights. Hasn’t turned green like the space between the tiles. The spaces he can slip into so easily, pass through and stay there for a long, long time.

When his back hits the cold stone of the patio, his self is purged from it with a rush of spit and water. Steve trickles out slowly, and the chest of the body he leaves is being pushed by small hands and flimsy wrists. Punched, hit. Pushed again. The nose is pinched, and it can’t breathe right for a few seconds before his name is called, and Steve is pulled right back inside the shell he’s been trying to leave since his brain figured out how.

(He has trouble working out what’s real, sometimes.)

Right now, this moment. He knows this is real. Because Nancy is hovering over him with a handgun he’s seen before, and her sleeves are wet all the way up to the shoulder.

She’s stronger than he remembers. He used to doubt she could do so much. Now she’s holding a gun, and she’s going to kill him. He sees it, therefore it’s true.

“Steve,”

_I know what happened and you can deny it as much as you want but Jonathan has pictures, Steve,and it backs up everything his mom has been saying, everything I’ve been feeling. Something is wrong. I need to know where you were. It’s important. Barb and I got here and you weren’t home, and now the cops are saying—_

_Just tell me what happened! You’re my best friend, and I’m sorry that things got messed up between us, but you can’t just shut me out! You’ve been drifting again, missing out on your classes.You didn’t even recognise me in the hall the other day. I’m worried about you—_

“Steve, the police are here.”

She has a gun, so she must want to kill him. He can feel his own vomit creeping along his skin. He wonders if it’s blue.

“They’re gonna take you to a hospital.”

_We found Barbara’s car - we know she skipped town. The investigation is being carried out by the state, now. You have every right to be concerned about your friend, but that’s not why we’re here._

_They've found a body. It took a while as she must've gone far out. They say it was a suicide. I'm sorry if that's hard for you to hear, considering..._

They don’t know about Barb. They never knew anything about Barb. She’s rotting in another world somewhere with monsters and creatures with slick not-skin and blood much too dark that bubbles in the heat. They don’t know.

-

It's when he's given those long, aching looks that he wishes he could remember more. The pinched eyebrows and sad eyes that tell him he's pitied, and they're sorry he's broken. Doctors, classmates, teachers, neighbors. People he doesn't know who know his parents speak to him, pat his hair and ruin the height he spent the morning building up. It's one of his few rituals that he actually takes time to carry out. He arrives to school looking relatively presentable with a car that's out of gas and no schoolbag, change for milk or a soda loose in the bottom of his jeans pockets, mud on his shoes when he's only been walking on pavement. On days when he wanders, never present in his head to know where he's going but able to put a foot in front of the other on repeat, he's rarely stopped to ask if he's alright. That comes later, when he's close enough to his house to be considered safe. Someone will pull him aside, touch his arm or stand arms distance, and _look_. They'll ask about his parents, about Nancy. Ask if he's keeping up with schoolwork. Ask if he's doing better. Ask if he's getting the help he needs. Tell him he should. He's a nice boy, and Hawkins really can't take another scare.

-

He made the decision on a cold Tuesday after school, when the sun dipped low enough to be considered dark. He didn’t crinkle the plastic in his hands or his pockets. He had his nice shoes on. The brown ones that matched with the lighter brown and beige pants his mom likes to buy him. (If he wants jeans, he pays for them himself, though the money all comes from the same place anyway.)

He isn’t sad. He doesn’t see the school counsellor. Or think about dying. Or cry twenty-four-seven. He isn’t sad, he’s just absent. Whatever happens to the spirit doesn’t affect the body once it gets back inside. He’s seen it. He left the house empty.

When the rocks shifted under him, he wasn't thinking of any of these reasons. He was upright, then he wasn't. His thighs slid first, hip twisting and bruising as his elbows collided with the cold shale, and for once the drop in his stomach was a real, tangible thing. He found himself barely clinging to the edge of the rockface - flat, rubber-soled loafers slipping at the toes. The points of his elbows kept him hovering in the heaviest body he's had. Sticks and gravel under his fingertips found it easy to pierce his skin. Made him bleed as he used the muscles in the same body's shoulders that failed him at swimming to pull himself (tensed and aching and splitting skin in his elbows) back onto horizontal rock, heaving breaths into a stranger’s lungs.

His body's heart pumped blood to fast for a long time (the sound was a rush so different from the silence) before Steve was able to recognise it. His legs had dangled in negative space for far too long. Blood from inside was now outside and it was going to be different than this; he wasn't meant to be in parts. He wasn't in parts. His limbs were attached still. Limbs of his body that he's lived in for years. Tongue tasting cigarettes and eyes blurred. Stinging.

Steve curled tighter over the cracked stone, away from the mouth of the quarry ready to swallow him whole. It scraped at him through the thin fabric of his khakis. The khakis with the wide back pocket that fit the folded plastic in a perfect square.

Reality dwelled under his wounds, in the three PRN's he swallowed in the locker room, soaked in his bloodstream. Reality was an aversion to the home in his head. An unstable threat and a body of water.

Steve bawled his eyes into the sleeve of his cardigan, squeezing them tight enough to hurt. Pressed his face into scratchy fabric, grit against his teeth, breathing so fast because they were his lungs now and he had to breathe to live. It was hard hearing himself cry. He hadn't heard it before. Like this. He didn't want to hear it again.

He thumped his forehead on the rock at least once before he passed out there, far enough to be safe, one foot hanging over the edge. Bleary and blotchy with abrasions and a headache and mismatched socks.

-

_"Jonathan has pictures. We can show this to someone - The police, or maybe a reporter or something. Someone who will take us seriously. They're doing the same to Barb as they're doing to Will and it's all wrong, Steve. We have...well, we have the one picture. And Joyce has been speaking up, too, chasing the Chief around, trying to get him to listen. What we have, it's..._

_ It’s not enough, is it?" _

-

He doesn’t remember walking back to the house, but he does remember calling the cops and telling them he may have killed Barbara Holland. The Ziploc from the kitchen was missing, and the back gate to the pool was open.


End file.
